A WhatDoTheyKnow user Tom Taylor has posted a cool query to the Royal Mail - he wants a list of where all the postboxes in the UK are (presumably so he can build a ‘find your nearest post box’ web site).
After some delay Colin Young of the Royal Mail responded with a list in a PDF file. However, whilst the list is pretty long, it only contains the postcode location of each postbox, not an actual coordinate that can be plotted on a map. So neither he, nor anyone else, can build a postbox finder service.
Just think about that for a second. The Post Office doesn’t know where its Post Boxes are. Whoda thunk? Good use of WhatDoTheyKnow.com, Tom!
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August 21st, 2008 at 11:29am
Ooh - that’s me! It’s a real shame that Royal Mail don’t hold the information, perhaps they should equip their postmen with GPSs and blitz the lot? They visit each one once a day after all…
August 21st, 2008 at 2:57pm
Ooh, I feel another crowd-sourcing project coming on! Gentlemen, start your GPSs…
September 1st, 2008 at 12:25pm
Meanwhile, Edward Betts has converted the data found by the FOI request into a structured TSV file.
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/location_of_every_post_box_that#comment-48
October 9th, 2008 at 11:05pm
Help us locate the postboxes: http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/locating-postboxes/ - Oxford is already doing well!
October 10th, 2008 at 5:27pm
From what I’ve read, the ordnance survey “mastermap” contains the locations of postboxes in its “topography layer”. However who knows how complete it is? (is it based on the locations the surveyors see when they draw the maps or are they also using some data from royal mail?). Or how accurate it is (probably good if a person is drawing it).
Also I wonder if royalmail uses it to find its own postboxes!
April 14th, 2009 at 12:28pm
I agree completely with the Tom. It’s not exactly a hard task to carry out.